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Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

arstechnica.com

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Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

#491

Post by pjerem »

HenryBemis wrote: post #480
flomo wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't seem hard, people like your father can be allow-listed, he's not signing-up out of the blue. (I'm wondering if this "works" because the early adopters were hackintosh types who were already on imessage and not abusers. When the H3rb8l V18gr8 crowd shows up, that is the end.)

Now then.. if I am a professional spammer (which I am not), what stops me from buying a second hand mac or a second hand iphone (for $150 each) and start 'doing business' with iMessage? Unless it's an issue of 'iPhones can't be JB-ed like Androids can be rooted to run all shorts of malware/spamming softwares'. I get Apple's "this is our toy, you won't be making $2/month/user on us". But "keeping the spammers out" it'…

The whitelist would be on the phone number/icloud id and not tied to the device.

That’d be pretty difficult to get second hand, especially when you can just spam over SMS.

They could even release a new iMessage protocol with another bubble color and let the blue ones become uncool.

Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

#492

Post by Longhanks »

rezonant wrote: post #389
verwalt wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is: it is not locking in. At the moment through SMS and it will support RCS next year. And RCS will solve it all. If group chats and high quality media work, people will only complain about the one thing they hate most: The bubbles will still be green. But I am from Europe, we don't care around here and I don't like iMessage that much. Compared to Telegram/Whatsapp, it's slow at loading old messages, has sy…

1. You cannot opt to use SMS on Apple Messages when talking to someone. If they are registered on iMessage, you are forced to use it. This happens transparently, automatically, and for the most part, silently. This helps to create the illusion that Apple devices are just better at texting, and anything else is old and shitty. When in reality, Apple itself only supports their own proprietary messaging system, and an a…

You absolutely can disable iMessage for yourself and text anyone using regular texts (SMS) only, you are never forced into iMessage. You can deregister your phone number on Apple's website without any Apple device.

Also, where is the "illusion" about "being better at texting"? Apple is literally coloring the bubbles differently to tell you that _iMessage is not the same_. How much more explicit can it get?

Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

#493

Post by maccard »

8note wrote: post #300
joshmanders wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure I do too, but I'm against this ridiculous notion that Apple MUST allow others to integrate and use their services for free. My point is nobody has any problem with the myriad of other messaging platforms that are completely closed, but all of the sudden iMessage is the bad guy because you don't want to have a green bubble with iPhone users?

A proper thing is for the EU to require apple to implement an interoperabile message api and force that to be used as the default, rather than being able to use a non-interoperable messaging protocol as the default

Like SMS, which is the default right now unless both users are iPhone users?

Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

#494

Post by Longhanks »

simonklitj wrote: post #467
rtpg wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what happened is that Americans got unlimited SMS plans meaning they got used to just communicating by SMS. Europe got WhatsApp to deal with wild SMS pricing. So Europeans moved over to WhatsApp etc. Americans continued using SMS. Apple took advantage of this with iMessage silently upgrading stuff to their protocol. On top of this iPhone penetration in many places in the US is much higher I think.

Wild SMS pricing in Europe? Unlimited SMS has been the default in Denmark for at least 15 years.

Well, Denmark is not the whole of Europe.

In Switzerland, free texts to non-Swiss numbers is expensive/rather uncommon. Instant Messaging is free to anyone the the world. Thus, SMS are dead (except for 2FA).

Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

#495

Post by Aeglaecia »

StressedDev wrote: post #477
standardUser wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh, it is beyond depressing to imagine Apple bigwigs sitting around discussing ways to make absolutely certain teens keep getting ostracized until they buy their overpriced product.

If someone is ostracizing you because you do not own an iPhone, you probably want to avoid that person. I have never met anyone who would do this and frankly, only an extremely nasty person would do this. I am mean seriously, why ostracized someone because they use a different type of phone?

I admire the surety in children applying logic to their behaviour

Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

#496

Post by kuschku »

joshmanders wrote: post #32
aesh2Xa1 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has customers who want to use iMessage. Those customers are not able to use iMessage to securely communicate with Android users. That's pretty clear. If Apple's customers want to be able to use iMessage for such communications then (1) the Android user buys an Apple product, (2) a third party makes a cross-platform iMessage client, or (3) Apple open iMessage to other platforms. Apple is blocking on (2) and (3).

> Apple has customers who want to use iMessage. Those customers are not able to use iMessage to securely communicate with Android users. I as a Signal user want to communicate securely with Facebook Messenger users. Therefore Facebook must allow me to reverse engineer their services and make unauthorized systems to allow me to create a service to send messages to Messenger users from Signal.

> I as a Signal user want to communicate securely with Facebook Messenger users. Therefore Facebook must allow me to reverse engineer their services and make unauthorized systems to allow me to create a service to send messages to Messenger users from Signal.

That's precisely what Signal started out as :)

Before Signal existed, it was common to use Pidgin or Adium with OTR to send encrypted messages through SMS, Google Chat or Facebook Messenger.

TextSecure – the original name of Signal – was created to improve upon OTR by allowing it to better handle situations where one user was offline while the other tried to send messages. Originally it only supported sending messages via SMS, not via their own servers.

Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

#497

Post by kuschku »

joshmanders wrote: post #44
user_7832 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think calls for interoperable communication platforms is a good thing!

Sure I do too, but I'm against this ridiculous notion that Apple MUST allow others to integrate and use their services for free. My point is nobody has any problem with the myriad of other messaging platforms that are completely closed, but all of the sudden iMessage is the bad guy because you don't want to have a green bubble with iPhone users?

> My point is nobody has any problem with the myriad of other messaging platforms that are completely closed

That's entirely wrong. A lot of people are angry with every closed messaging platform, which is why people are still maintaining the matrix bridges to Discord, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Signal, all of which are still a cat-and-mouse game, violating the ToS of those services.

Those bridges are actually what Beeper Cloud, their primary product, later was also based on.

And these bridges originally are based on the libpurple backends for Slack, Teams, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Signal, AIM, ICQ, Google Chat, Skype, etc, all of which were created through reverse engineering.

So, yeah, fuck those closed services, messages want to be free, and enough people will care that we'll break all of those services.

Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

#498

Post by makeitdouble »

nucleardog wrote: post #474
makeitdouble wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My definition of a win for Apple would be to have the problem go away and the attention dissipate. That's how it went for Nothing's attempt for instance, where it was instantly ridiculed and everyone forgot about it. Right now, they blocked a part of Beeper mini, and nobody expecting a rock solid service would join Beeper Mini so Apple's won't be losing any of their core customers. But the news cycle keeps going on,…

> so Apple's won't be losing any of their core customers. They won't be losing _any_ of their customers. For the most part[^], nobody using Beeper Mini has paid Apple for anything... otherwise they wouldn't need to use Beeper Mini. [^] Yes I'm sure there's at least a few people with an iPhone and a Windows PC or something that see this as "iMessage on Windows".

Beeper mini is not ready for regular use, so it's not even a question, but I think there's many potential use if it was any good.

For instance if you have a mac and an iPad but use an android phone, iMessages will go to both Apple devices but not where you want it the most, on your phone. That's the kind of pain point that pushes a group to fully move to another service if the android members have enough weight, but would be fine if there was a reliable android client.

Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

#499

Post by vineyardmike »

StressedDev wrote: post #477
standardUser wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh, it is beyond depressing to imagine Apple bigwigs sitting around discussing ways to make absolutely certain teens keep getting ostracized until they buy their overpriced product.

If someone is ostracizing you because you do not own an iPhone, you probably want to avoid that person. I have never met anyone who would do this and frankly, only an extremely nasty person would do this. I am mean seriously, why ostracized someone because they use a different type of phone?

Do you forget being a teenager? /s

It's not simply a MeanGirls experience of not being cool enough. Most Americans don't use or have 3rd party apps like WhatsApp, so most people will fall-back to SMS, which is objectively a much worse experience. I feel like the adult equivalent is getting group dinner with a friend with severe allergies or dietary restrictions. You care about your friend, and you want to invite them, but the effort to include them is high and sometimes you want to try a restaurant you know they can't eat at, so you skip the invite. I'm a vegetarian, and I know my friends skip me outright in the steakhouse dinners.

50% of Americans have an iPhone, and that is even higher for teenagers (almost 90%). That means >50% of people have this superior group functionality built-in (can't beat defaults). That means for teenagers, most of your friends will have iMessages, and most will be able to do effortless group chats, and its a statistical dice-roll to see if someone doesn't have an iPhone. You become "that guy" that causing disruption, and you'll 100% be ignored sporadically.

Again, the issue isn't "I don't wanna see green bubbles", the issue is "I don't want to bother with a third party app for this conversation". Since most people don't regularly use 3rd party messaging apps, there's a coordination issue to be solved picking the app and confirming everyone has it, OR falling back to SMS which is pretty messy. The alternative is to skip one friend and just fill them in later. Sometimes it's easier, it's not an elitist attempt to ostracize.

Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

#500

Post by kuschku »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #120
rrreese wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m baffled as to when this time was? Back in the day there was ICQ, Yahoo Chat, MSN Messenger (and no doubt a dozen I forget). Before the there there the proprietary networks (Aol, CompuServe and others) along with BBS, IRC, Newsgroups, etc. I literally don’t remember a time in my life where messaging hasn’t been fragmented.

A brief period (~2008-2015) when XMPP had momentum and federation was trendy, if incomplete. Apps like Trillian, Pidgin (Gaim), Adium actually allowed chatting across many platforms on the client side. To some extent they still can, with add-ons.

That's precisely what the primary Beeper Cloud and the old Element One product are for. Just connect to your Signal, Discord, Facebook, WhatsApp, iMessage accounts and chat with all of them in one single app.

Beeper Cloud and Element One do this through matrix bridges, but Beeper has been trying to move this entirely into the client again, which is what Beeper Mini is an experiment for.

If Beeper Mini succeeds, it'll soon also support Signal, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger. If Apple succeeds, messaging will remain fragmented.

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